STEPPING LATERALLY UP THE MOUNTAIN (MEDIUM POST)

Doing the work for the work’s sake. Or maybe it’s focus on the process and just the daily work, the daily practice. Not being distracted by all your grand plans that keep you daydreaming rather than taking incremental steps to do better, be better, and work on what’s needed for the day.

It all sounds manageable and perfectly reasonable. It seems like the way forward, to progress. But what if what you’re doing isn’t working. You’re doing the work but it doesn’t seem to be the right work. It seems to be the high-result yielding work that you’re told to focus on but you ask yourself every day, every week, every month, sometimes even every year — what is it yielding?

That’s when you ask yourselves the questions. Am I impatient and do I just spend years more going through the mud, creating and producing and persevering and doing more and more and more work before this great yield happens? Am I being naive, unreasonable to think it should have happened by now? So and so worked for decades before any of the work they did helped them scale that great mountain.

When enough time goes by though and you see yourself at the same place on the mountain. When you look down and look up and realize you haven’t moved an inch for some time, it’s necessary to evaluate what you’ve been doing and what your efforts really are without ego, dispassionately, forsaking the love of your own creations. Maybe the way isn’t forward and it certainly isn’t back. Maybe you need to take a knee on the side of that mountain, breath into the sky, stand back up and take a step to the side rather than try to take another step up. And after you step to the side, stand tall and look to scale the mountain from this new perspective. There may be another path, a better one, one that you can find your footing in, if you take enough steps laterally.